Will a Dual Layer DVD play in a normal DVD Player/Xbox360?

[nyycavo24]

I just ordered and received a MBP this past January and I found out this weekend in the midst of a pretty major video editing project that my drive is a dual layer. Its a MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E drive and in the specs it denotes -R DL and +R DL....Im assuming that means dual layer?

Does this mean that I can go out and buy dual layer DVD Rs and burn double the amount of stuff on there and in the case of FCE/iDVD movies, they will play in a normal DVD player exactly the same as a normal DVD?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Darth.Titan]

Yes. Dual layer media plays just fine in standard DVD players.

 

[rogersmj]

Every movie you buy from the store is already a DL DVD, so yes every DVD player should be able to read them. It was part of the standard nearly from the beginning.

EDIT: A little piece of trivia/evidence of this: Most movies are too long to fit on a single layer, so they're split across the two layers. If you are watching a movie very closely, somewhere near the middle (and they always do it on a scene transition so sometimes it's very hard to detect) there will be an ever so slight split-second freeze as the DVD player hits the end of the first layer and has to refocus the laser onto the second layer. The picture will be motionless and there will be no sound -- for maybe 1/4 of a second, perhaps less. It's there on every DVD movie I've ever watched; I've sort of made a game out of looking for it.

 

[pj4533]

I guess technically it is supposed to work, but I have had any luck getting my regular DVD player (or xbox360) to recognize these DVD+R dual layer discs burned from Toast8.

The computer plays them fine, but not my settop box or the 360.

I tried several things, but it just got tedious so now i am just going to shrink it down to fit on a 4.7 disc.

-pj

 

[rogersmj]

^ That's a good point, set-top boxes (DVD players, Xbox 360, etc) tend to me sensitive to different brands of media, even though it's supposed to be compatible. So don't buy a huge bulk of media until you've found one that definitely works.

 

[pj4533]

To be fair, i felt i should come back here.....

I think SO many things can go wrong when pressing DVDs that its easy to blame the wrong culprit. For example, I naturally thought my problem was the duallayer discs, cause that is what is different about this particular burn i was doing. I spent HOURS on the problem, finally giving up and pressing a 4.7gb disc (as i said above).

Well, that didn't work either. Then i started to use the old noggin' and i realized that in DVD2OneX it said my dvd was PAL!!!!!!! DOH! So, yeeaaaaaaaah, regardless of how crappy or awesome my dual layer disc media was, my ntsc dvd player just wasn't going to cooperate with a Pal disc!

Just goes to show you that while i was CONVINCED my problem was a dvd+r dual layer issue, it was something else altogether.

-pj

 

[NIPRING]

PAL....its the work of the devil!